I have just watched the video...its clear and to the point.I have one caveat...I wish whoever produced it had trusted the material to speak for itself. A sound track of sub Samuel Barber music in order to tell us what we should be feeling is at best superfluous in my opinion...but perhaps thats just me.Its one reason I avoid videos. Worst of all is bloody flutes noodlin' away..

On the average I take fifteen breaths per minute. That's nine hundred breaths an hour, 21,000 breaths a day. Last year about 55 million human beings died, about 150,000 every day, so with every breath I take, seven people die.

Bob

[I could offer analogous figures for births, which outnumber deaths two to one, but birth is problematic to Buddhists.]

Rarely. I've always found death to be a premature symbol of impermanance. The amount of people who committ suicide on a daily basis is a good example of how impermance is what people are really afraid of rather than death.

Last edited by thewhitesquirel on Mon Oct 10, 2011 10:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

What is nearness if it fails to come about despite the reduction of the longest intervals? What is nearness if it is even repelled by the restless abolition of distances? What is nearness if remoteness also remains absent? -Martin Heidegger

But I think about death every day, or rather thoughts of death come. Agreed it isn't a metaphor. Seeing a living breathing person, a who, turn into an it, is always mind blowing. I remember being no more than 6 years old and seeing another child get crushed (head and chest) under the front right wheel of a Volkswagon, while playing down at the curb. His mother, who was in a nearby ground floor apartment unit, came screaming out of the open patio door. Her grief and trauma were beyond words. That memory is like a demon that comes now and then, and I guess it always will be.I hope death comes to me in a way that is not a shock to those around me, so that they can get used to the idea.

Oops. I've changed the word metaphor to symbol. Death is a symbol of impermenance. Obviously, not a metaphor.

...very slow today.

What is nearness if it fails to come about despite the reduction of the longest intervals? What is nearness if it is even repelled by the restless abolition of distances? What is nearness if remoteness also remains absent? -Martin Heidegger

Are you suggesting death doesn't also have a symbolic meaning for people? I'm not trying to set you up or anything. I'm sincerely dumbfounded as to what you're suggesting. It sounds very strange and literalistic (materialistic too) to my phenomenological ears.

Impermanence makes life possible. Better back to metaphor.

HA! Okay. Wait a minute... are you an atheist zombie whose come back from the grave to tell us how death is a permenant nothingness that you never come back from...

Oh and I'm sorry. They only had a ninja. No zombies yet.

What is nearness if it fails to come about despite the reduction of the longest intervals? What is nearness if it is even repelled by the restless abolition of distances? What is nearness if remoteness also remains absent? -Martin Heidegger

I can only answer for myself...it takes the form of remembering that I and all those I love will die, and that time flies.A story about Ajahn Chah. He had a favourite cup. It was old and cracked had been repaired with gold coloured resin.Someone asked him if he was attached to it. He held it up to the light and looked at it and said.." I like it very much. And in my mind I have seen it in pieces on the floor a hundred times...always be letting go. "

I just want to ask the people who told that they often think about death, what are they actually thinking about?

The lost days that would be missed? The people left behind? What comes next?

Or what?

Loved ones who disappear one by one. The freind who died from pancreatic cancer this past winter. Jaundice. Executions. Corpses in stacks here and there. The two racoons that liquified in our garage last year. The cousin who died in her bed and laid there for weeks in the summer until she burst and the smell alerted the authorities. The grid drawn in violet colored grease pencil on my fathers head to guide the radiation therapist, and the smell of cooked bone. You know... death, what's coming to you.

.. Not lost days since I won't be here to know the difference. People who have to care for me in the dying process which can be a reeeeal drag. Not what comes next, no more next.

But hey... there is also all the great stuff, like art, and trees, and slingshotting cartoon birds into cartoon pigs in shelters, creme brulee, and a warm October evening.